Should You Choose VPS or Cloud Hosting for Your New Website?

When the time comes to choose your web host you’re probably going to have a ton of questions. Hosting can seem a little complicated. You have cloud hosting, shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers and you have dozens of hosting companies to choose from as well.

Yikes! With this post we hope to reduce a little bit of that confusion. Below we dive into the differences between cloud and VPS hosting.

What Is a VPS?

VPS servers are also known as Virtual Private Servers. This style of server is essentially one physical server, which is then divided into several smaller virtual servers. Each one of these virtual servers acts as its own server environment.

Since you have your own dedicated section of the server, you have your own set of allocated resources and can customize and configure your server partition exactly the way you want. Plus, there’s no exchange of data or file access between accounts on the VPS server.

However, they can tend to be less reliable because if one physical server fails, then every VPS using that server fails as well. Their performance can also vary if one site happens to be hogging resources on the physical server.

Who should use VPS hosting? Virtual Private Server hosting is great for users looking for more control over their website, with the technical skills to set up a customized environment.

What Is a Cloud Server?

Cloud servers are known by several names including VM or Virtual Machines.

Cloud servers are similar to a VPS hosting environment. The key difference is that instead of having a single server that’s dedicated to your site (as is the case with VPS), the resources are spread out amongst a bunch of different physical machines.

With a cloud hosting platform, you benefit from the use of multiple servers, so you have more available resources at your disposal. You can increase the power of your server whenever you’d like to meet varying traffic needs.

While cloud hosting offers more flexibility than VPS hosting, it doesn’t allow for quite as much customization.

Who should use cloud hosting? Cloud hosting is a great choice for website owners who need the flexibility that cloud hosting provides, to enable increased performance to meet surges in traffic.